Seen but Not Heard

The revelatory silence of “Switched at Birth.”

The two teen-agers become friends, but the story of the switch is still unfolding.Credit Illustration by Malika Favre

My grandmother had a favorite critical category: “fine, but not for me.” That’s where I’d slotted “Switched at Birth,” a teen-centric drama that looked commercial and cookie-cutter, judging from quick glances at promos. It took some persuading to get me to take a second look, but I’m glad I did.

Much of my distrust came from the fact that the show airs on ABC Family, a cable channel co-owned by Disney. Networks, like people, have personalities. FX, for example, is a smart jerk with annoyingly excellent taste. Showtime is a brilliant basket case who overdoes it at parties. USA is a suit who is surprisingly good in bed; Bravo is Andy Cohen; PBS doesn’t own a TV. Among this crowd, ABC Family had always struck me as a conventional teen-age girl, all white teeth and scrunchies. The channel’s flagship series is “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” the follow-up by the writer of the Christian soap opera “7th Heaven.” At once prurient and prudish, “Secret Life” is a skillfully made series, but it’s a toxic product, glamorizing teen-age pregnancy more than “Teen Mom” ever has.

Yet, more recently, and with little fanfare, ABC Family has taken to green-lighting series by female showrunners with idiosyncratic visions. Two years ago, the channel launched—and then cancelled after only ten episodes—my single favorite show of 2010: “Huge,” a series about a fat camp, created by Savannah Dooley (the daughter of Winnie Holzman, the creator of “My So-Called Life”). This year, ABC Family débuted Amy Sherman-Palladino’s oddball “Bunheads,” about small-town ballerinas. “Switched at Birth” is the work of Lizzy Weiss, the screenwriter behind the awesome girl-surf movie “Blue Crush,” but the show is rarely discussed among the TV digerati, possibly because many people assume from the title that it’s an exploitative reality show. It isn’t—it’s fiction—but the premise is just what it sounds like: two teen-age girls discover that, as babies, they were switched in a Kansas City hospital, probably by a nurse. The situation becomes a local scandal. Yet the show doesn’t approach that splashy premise as camp, but mines it instead for sly existential insights.

The central figures are the two girls, who are both sixteen: Bay Kennish (Vanessa Marano), who was raised in a prosperous family, with a jock dad, a perky stay-at-home mom, and a dissolute brother; and Daphne Vasquez (Katie Leclerc), the only child of a Latino single mom, Regina (Constance Marie), a recovering alcoholic who works as a hairdresser. A moody, underachieving artist in a family of just-do-it types, Bay was alienated from her family even before the revelation. The scandal lets her shed her skin: among other things, she can identify as a Latina from the wrong side of the tracks, instead of as a private-school-educated white girl. Jumping into boundary-crossing relationships and Banksy-type street art, she readily identifies with her new mother’s more “exotic” emotional style.

In contrast, the athletic Daphne is deeply bonded with the woman who raised her; the revelation that Regina is not her biological mother is a threat to their tight unit. (As episodes pass, she gets further shocks: her mother, it turns out, knew about the switch much earlier. Her reasons for not telling the authorities have much to do with Regina’s awareness of how society perceives her as compared with the stable, wealthy, white Kennishes.) Daphne is also deaf, having lost her hearing at the age of three, after a bout of meningitis, and her family is immersed in deaf culture. Although Daphne is drawn to the Kennishes, their entitlement puts her off. (Their first impulse is to buy her a car.) The girls become friends, although they get off to a shaky start, since Bay quickly recognizes that Daphne is the daughter her parents might have preferred.

Daphne’s deafness was not part of the show’s original concept: when Weiss pitched the show to ABC Family, the network suggested a plotline about disability. It was the rare network note to make a show more radical, aesthetically as well as thematically. Within its varied deaf ensemble, no one perspective dominates. There’s Daphne, who lip-reads and speaks, and longs to succeed in the mainstream. There’s her closest friend, Emmett (the outstanding Sean Berdy), who has a sardonic attitude toward hearing culture. (The two collaborate on a zombie film called “Dawn of the Deaf.”) There’s Emmett’s mother (Marlee Matlin) and his feckless father (Anthony Natale), both deaf, who are divorcing, as well as Travis (Ryan Lane), a rancorous teen-ager who is willing to exploit his own “victim” status. The show finds tensions within intra-deaf relationships as well as hearing-deaf ones, including a lively romance between Bay and Emmett.

But perhaps most striking is the show’s approach to the aesthetics of deafness. Conversations among deaf characters are silent, with signing and subtitles. While series like “The West Wing” and “The L Word,” which also included deaf actors (well, Marlee Matlin), contrived ways to have hearing characters translate each scene, in “Switched at Birth” there is often no one to do the translation. Some characters refuse to speak; hearing characters are often bad at signing. During signed dialogue we hear nothing but a trickling fountain in the background, or the sounds of distant crowds. The result is a show that can’t be skimmed: in extended scenes among deaf characters, whole minutes elapse, submerging the audience in a world that feels intimate and alive, rich with grimaces, grins, and other physical nuances we’d usually ignore.

Some of the show’s plots are cornier than others—as with every drama, love triangles form and dissolve. With its occasional bluntness, “Switched at Birth” falls short of the purity of a teen classic like “My So-Called Life,” or the more sophisticated “Parenthood.” (Then again its first season has thirty episodes, doled out in mini-seasons months apart; production pressures may account for some of this unevenness.) But, even in familiar turns, the writers find sharp angles. Daphne pursues a culinary career, only to find no job. “Can I ask what your accent is?” a woman interviewing her says. “It’s so unusual. It’s not Russian, is it? . . . Swedish?” Whenever she discloses that she is deaf, the situation goes south—“My dog is deaf,” the woman blurts out nervously—until Daphne takes her half brother Toby’s advice to ask their biological mother to use her influence. Her new boss resents the forced hire. “I’m sure you grew up being told you could do everything you wanted,” he tells her. “That’s good. You had good parents. Now I’m going to tell you the truth: you can’t do everything.”

Daphne’s anxieties as she copes with this situation—her reluctance to ask for help, her growing attraction to the chef who has insulted her, her stifled resentment toward a world that won’t accommodate her—are presented as complex and legitimate. “I’m gonna be stuck as a dishwasher or a truck driver for the rest of my life,” she tells Toby. “You’re different,” he tells her, a Kennish eager to assume that all problems are solvable. “Everyone thinks they’re different,” she replies bitterly.

The high-drama romance between the hearing Bay and the deaf Emmett is currently the centerpiece of the show, for good reason: Berdy, in particular, has a James Dean charisma that breaks open every scene. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kennish has written a memoir, and the mystery of the switch is still unfolding—we now know why Daphne’s Italian father left (because his daughter was pale, he concluded that his wife had cheated) and why Regina didn’t reveal the switch (struggling with alcoholism and poverty, she feared she’d lose custody of both Daphne and Bay).

“Switched at Birth” might benefit from a more sophisticated style, I guess. The soundtrack can be syrupy, the editing workmanlike—although the show does a nice job of capturing the milieu of Kansas City, including its visual-arts scene. But, as a person whose TV fanhood began with a junky-looking teen show with a silly name (“Buffy”—here’s looking at you, kid), I should have known better than to stop at the surface. When “Switched at Birth” hits its groove—particularly in those silent exchanges between Daphne and Emmett, whose timing has never allowed them to be together, but whose unconsummated love feels like the show’s long game—its undertow is as strong as anything on TV. ♦